


The Red Ribbon

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Series: Pauline [2]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-05
Updated: 2009-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In March, the weather begins to thaw out, and the corpse underneath the sewer grate begins to smell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Red Ribbon

**Author's Note:**

> Written for robin_2370_hood, who prompted me with "A Very Potter Musical, three notebooks, and soup." This was technically written _before_ Remove Tag Before Washing, which prequels it. idk either, man.
> 
> Spoilers for The Last Olympian. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://antistar-e.livejournal.com/446031.html?format=light).

-

 

**january.**

This is how it ends:

A knife, a throat, a slender tendril of blood pooling at the collarbone, the trail inky in the dark.

A threat, a puff of mist hissing in the cold, stale air, bitter and heartfelt. _If you ever lay a hand on her again, I will fucking kill you._

A half-blood walks out of the alley. A mortal man slumps down the wall, fingers smearing in the blood at his throat as he clutches it, pulse throbbing against his fingertips, heart still beating.

The line is blurred between worlds. In the mortal realm, there are things worse than monsters.

This is how it begins again.

 

**february.**

"I don't get why you two insisted you _had_ to come," says Annabeth, her hands in her pockets and the ends of her curls kicking in the wind. She only wears a ponytail these days inside the safety of her own home, because frankly, she's not thirteen anymore. "Most men I know have to be bribed with equivocal amounts of sex to come dress-shopping. Then again, most women I know wouldn't trust a man's opinion with a dress in any case."

"Oh, come on," Percy cajoles, hooking his fingers around her elbow and pulling her into his side. "We _wanted_ to come."

"We wanted to make sure you didn't make a horrible mistake," puts in Nico from her other side. "Like taffeta."

"It has to have a little taffeta," counters Percy. "If it didn't, it'd probably be way out of our price range."

"Okay, fine. But it definitely needs a full skirt. She has the waist for it."

"Oh, yeah. And beading around the bodice. But not a lot, you know what I mean, because there's interesting and then there's just, like, fourth-grade arts and crafts."

"Okay!" Annabeth holds out her hands, one on each chest, her bare fingers raw and red from the cold. "Stop! This is gay, even for you two."

Percy's eyebrows go up: she recognizes the expression, the _you haven't seen anything yet._ He turns from her and literally _skips_ down the sidewalk. Annabeth didn't even know men _could_ skip. She thought it was something to do with the way women's hips were jointed that they could skip and men simply could not.

" _When I rule the world, I'll plant flowers,"_ he warbles, loud enough to make Annabeth flush bright red, because people are staring.

" _When I rule the world, I'll have snakes,"_ Nico sings back, which is somehow even more mortifying and creepy.

"Stop!" she all but squeaks. "Fine, fine, you can help me pick my gown, just _stop_ with the YouTube musicals, for gods' sakes."

Her groom and her best man grin triumph at each, and in unison, step forward and open the double doors of the bridal shop for her with mock bows. She laughs at them, feeling full and happy.

 

**march.**

The weather turns -- not by a lot, but by enough, and the body that has been triple-bagged and stuffed under the sewer grate begins to smell.

It's New York, though, so it arrives in the coroner's office tagged John Doe and nobody cares too much, not really, and between the rats and Mrs. Rollowski's small, yappy dog, there's not a lot left to the corpse, just bones and leftover bits of the garbage bag and scraps of orange fabric in the dead body's mouth.

It stays in the morgue for weeks before it's identified as Todd Jameson, 35, white Caucasian male hailing from Detroit, who was reported missing two months ago. There are people who care about him, it turns out, people who want answers.

Detective Freemason is not a particularly kind woman, nor compassionate, but she can understand that. She straightens her gun holster and goes to work.

 

**april.**

Annabeth's birthday is April 15th.

It's also, coincidentally, tax day.

After the fiasco last year, Annabeth tried to get everybody to write down their purchases and what money went where. She even put a spiral notebook out on the kitchen counter, right inside the front door, so everyone would remember when they walked in.

Twelve months in, and one notebook has become three, finances have nothing to do with what's written in them; it's mostly just arguments over toothpaste and stick figures doing suggestive things, and Annabeth's right back to where she started.

After the third hour of finance-crunching, Percy wonders out loud if it's too late to try what Luke did and take over the world, only to do it, you know, _better._

Eliminating taxes would be first on the list. Or maybe just, like, math in general.

"Yeah, I think you're too old for that," comes Nico's voice from wherever he'd hidden himself to avoid getting roped into the work. "I hear you can only get lots of followers while you're still good looking. Worked for Luke, at least."

"Nico. Shut up."

"As the only person in this house," is the lofty reply. "Who was not at one point completely besotted with Luke Castellan, I think my opinion is the only one that matters. Oh, _please --"_ he snorts when they both immediately squawk protest. "You _totally_ were."

 

**may.**

She stops a cluster of students underneath a budding tree and asks them where she can find Pauline. She knows for a fact that there are two Paulines at this school, but the kids seem to know immediately who she's talking about, because they direct her towards the cafeteria.

"She's the one with all the black hair and the ribbon around her neck, detective," a boy tells Clarisse, knowing who she is without her telling him. She arrested his father three years ago for putting him in the wheelchair he's in. "Usually sits by herself."

Clarisse nods her thanks. She finds the girl exactly where they said, sitting at a table underneath the window, pushing her food around her tray.

Pauline is fourteen, thin and bony -- the only color to her is the red ribbon around her neck, the tails trailing down her back. The expression in her eyes is blurry and far-away. She's been at this magnet school for years, Clarisse already knows. Her ADHD is medicated and she hides her dyslexia by staying mute. She goes to a camp for special needs kids in upstate New York every summer.

Clarisse Freemason puts a hand down on the table. Pauline looks up without pausing in her methodical stirring of the soup in her bowl.

"Do you know this man?" The mugshot of Todd Jameson lands on the table. Pauline's glassy black eyes blink. She's the one least likely to ever forget his face. The detective in Clarisse already knows this.

The detective also knows that Pauline has a brother.

 

**june.**

"What the fuck," says Nico eloquently. Beside him, his lawyer sighs and braces herself.

His hair is too long, bangs hanging in front of his eyes, the ends curled behind the shell of his ear. The knees and elbows of his scrubs are soft and worn through from hard wear. He looks small and harmless, incapable of even kicking a puppy -- exactly the kind of person you'd trust a baby with.

Clarisse is unimpressed. She remembers the kid with the jacket and the sword.

"What the fuck," says Nico again, and then holds out his hands. The links in the handcuffs tighten with the strain. "Okay, look at me. I'm a first-year pediatrics resident, looking for a specialty in obstetrics. I pull babies out of women's vaginas for a living. I can't kill anybody."

"Which is ironic, considering," Clarisse replies, tonelessly suggesting that if she can charge irony with being a murder weapon, she would.

Nico's eyes flash. He leans forward, focused on her like there's no one else in the room. "You don't know what it's like," he tells her, matter of fact, and no, she probably doesn't. "The closer I am, the louder I can hear it. The building across the street? The lady who lives on the floor second from the top has a tightening blood vessel in her brain. She'll stroke and die today or tomorrow. The bellhop's been shot, but hasn't gone to the doctor -- either he's illegal or part of a gang and doesn't want to get anyone involved. He's going to die. I can feel it, right here," he leans his head down, so his fingers can touch the back of his skull. 

His lawyer blinks, lost, and Clarisse keeps all expression out of her face.

"That's why I'm doing what I'm doing," says the son of Hades, voice as whispery quiet as a graveyard. "Death is in every part of me. So I want to bring life for a change."

"And Pauline?" Clarisse prompts.

The anger in Nico's eyes is blazing; part of it is simply being in Clarisse's presence, but part of it is -- "She's my baby sister," he hisses, fierce. "She's just a _child._ What that fucker did to her -- he's worse than any Greek monster."

"Bad enough for you to kill him?"

Nico smiles thinly.

"There are a lot of people I'd die for, detective," he says. Percy, Annabeth, my sisters, his eyes say, but his mouth does not: Clarisse hears it anyway. That part of Nico never changed. "But nothing I'd kill a human being for."

She holds his gaze. He looks back at her, and then he blinks, the moment broken. "Can I go?" he wants to know. "If you don't mind, I have a double rotation tonight and finals next week and I'm probably not going to sleep for the next three days, and I'd really appreciate it if I wasn't arrested on top of all that, thanks."

 

**july.**

For three weeks during the hottest part of the year, Percy's ship is in port, Nico is on break from school, and Annabeth is down from Mt. Olympus. It's the longest stretch of time they've had in each other's company since Christmas.

Nico remembers being fifteen, and wanting more of everything. More food, more time, more attention, more sex, lips and skin and nails dragging against his scalp. He remembers what it was like to fall in love, to feel dizzy and ridiculous and wanting to smile all the time and walk on tiptoes, all the while pretending that being around Percy didn't bother him at all.

Percy made it okay, Nico's sure of it -- made _this_ okay. He's a Harry Potter, a Peter Pevensie, a whatever literary teenage hero you want him to be. If he wanted Annabeth and Nico both, well, who the fuck had the right to tell him no?

Percy made it okay, made it something he could have, and Nico hates him for it and loves him. Oh, gods, he loves him.

He remembers proposing marriage at Christmas. "You two would be perfect. It would be the perfect storybook ending," he murmured into the curve of Annabeth's shoulder, Percy's lips on his spine. "Get married. Please."

"Greek heroes don't get storybook endings, Nico," Annabeth reminded him, her hair trailing all over his body like ink. "Them or their wives usually die, horribly and painfully, before the happily ever after."

"There was one," Nico answered. "Just the one. Married a girl, loved her, never looked at anyone else. They founded a city together."

"Who?"

Nico turned around in the cage of their arms, and when he whispered, "Perseus," the light flashed in Percy's eyes like a collision, and he crushed his mouth to his, destroyed by it.

"Perseus and Medea didn't have a boyfriend, too, did they?" he murmured a little while later, words humming against the red of Nico's lips.

"So?" said Annabeth, practical. "Be the first."

 

**august.**

Percy works at the wharf, which Annabeth insists is just a way for him to get away with wearing the same hoodie and ski cap for seven days out of the week without washing them and come home smelling like cigarettes and fish guts. 

In reality, Percy likes the proximity, and within his first year of working there, he'd managed to completely rearrange the infrastructure of the company so that they were the most humane fishers on Long Island. Also, his coworkers might be a little insane and only two of them speak some bastardized version of English, but they respect him in spite of how young he was when he started out, because he is, quote, "the best seaman we ever met," which stopped being ironic sometime around the time Percy turned sixteen, and was now just kind of like, "yeah, we know."

Clarisse brings NYPD with her to the pier. She doesn't think Percy will start anything -- he doesn't have to; his eyes flick over the men as if they were inconsequential, knowing he could take both of them without breaking a sweat -- but because she thinks the fishermen might. Percy inspires that quality in people: dumbshit recklessness in the name of love and loyalty.

"Eyewitness says you had an altercation with Todd Jameson in January," she asks him by way of cold statement. He's wearing a bomber jacket, she notes, meant for someone thinner than he is. The Air Force letters are peeling off the back, the elbows worn to white.

Percy's eyes glitter, bright as the sunlight off the surf behind him. "Surely you've seen my school record, detective," he chirps, offhand. "I have at least one violent -- what did you call them -- _altercation_ every year. It's a habit, I guess."

Clarisse calmly goes for the jugular. "Yes, but none of them ever kept your handicapped cousin locked in an abandoned fridge in a garbage dump for a month when she was eight."

Percy's eyes flash white-hot, and he replies, equally calmly, that that (fucking) son of a bitch had every (fucking) punch coming and deserves to rot for every (fucking) minute for the rest of his (fucking) afterlife and no (fucking) cop was going to say he didn't have it coming.

"Cuff him," Clarisse says to the men in blue.

The fishermen line up on either side of the pier like judge and jury as they walk Percy back to the squad car, hands behind his back and chin held high, triumph in every line of his face. It's strange, Clarisse reflects, that this scruffy, fishy-smelling man once annihilated an entire invading army, and yet he walks to the squad car looking like there's no greater accomplishment than stabbing a mortal man with a knife.

One of the fishermen spits at Clarisse's feet. She looks at them all, just standing and watching her arrest Percy Jackson for the murder of a child predator, and has never felt less like a figure of justice.

 

**september.**

Annabeth discovered a long time ago that yes, Nico was an ass, but he was _selective_ with his assyness and -- with all the logic of a five-year-old boy trying to figure out how friendships worked -- tended to act like the biggest ass to the people he liked best. Get around this, and he's actually perfectly nice. (Annabeth might even have told him this at one point. Bootleg alcohol from the Hermes' cabin was involved. Hopefully.)

She's also sure it's all his fault, this thing they have: after all, Nico had been a self-absorbed, back-stabbing brat at ten and things just got worse with acne. There'd been no role model to tell him that he was supposed to respect that Annabeth and Percy were simply meant to be.

It'd been Thanksgiving at Sally's place when she was eighteen, and she remembers being so full she was sure she was _waddling,_ and Nico'd pulled her to her feet and spun her around just to make her sick, because he did stuff like that. It became a kind of lazy dance from there, just the two of them swaying back and forth, and when Percy came to take Annabeth to bed, Nico came with like it was the most natural thing in the world, and from then on just kind of never left.

"I'll break him out," Nico whispers to the loose hairs at her temple, fierce. "There's no jail I can't break into, no cell I can't get him out of. They can't _do_ this."

"You will not," Annabeth replies with certainty, holding onto him in the middle of their living room, where they'd collided when he'd come straight from the hospital after she called him, leaving the courtroom to the swirl of browning leaves. Her fingers grasp at his back like she's trying to hold them both together at the seams.

"How come everyone thinks he did it?"

"Because that's the kind of person he is. It's gotten worse, I think, the older we get. Half-bloods never go back to Camp when they leave, have you noticed? The monsters go after the children -- all kinds of monsters. Percy just wants to be their protector." The way she says it, it sounds like some high schooler's essay on Catcher in the Rye.

She blinks. "Hang on. Did you just wipe your nose on my shirt?"

"Shut up," says Nico wetly, and she laughs and hugs him tighter.

 

**october.**

Clarisse Freemason is good at what she does. It's a good profession for a child of Ares -- simply by being around her, 90% of those she arrests confess. It's amazing how easy it is to forget the right to remain silent when you're being sneered at.

A cold night in January, Percy Jackson held a knife to Todd Jameson's throat and swore he'd kill him if he ever laid a hand on Pauline again. In March, he was found dead from a stab wound, wrapped in three garbage bags and stuffed in a sewer that led to the sea. In Percy's home, they find the knife tucked under the mattress, wiped clean and showing up blue under blacklight, with the fingerprints of all three members of the household. The kind of trash bags Jameson's body was in was the same kind Percy had under his sink.

But the piece of evidence that was going to put him away for a very long time was the shirt. An orange shirt, familiar to both of them and two sizes too small to be Percy's, discovered with the corpse, clenched between its teeth like a gag.

Percy isn't the most clever of murderers, but without that, there's no solid evidence to convict him, and Clarisse knows a dozen good lawyers that could spin him free.

In October, the shirt disappears from the evidence locker. All that's left of it is a pile of soot and ash in a wastebasket.

"Funny, that," Clarisse remarks casually to Percy when she sees him.

He smiles at her. "You should have put it somewhere where Nico couldn't get at it. He's a firestarter, that kid."

"And never too good at respecting the law, I remember."

She picks at the ashes underneath her nails. "I know who the real murderer is."

Percy looks down at the handcuffs, the red lines on his wrists. "Yeah. So do I."

 

**november.**

The father of the bride gets the first dance, and, coincidentally, the honor of being the first to pass out.

They get it on camera; Dr. Chase is never going to live it down.

By the end of the night, it's only Nico and Annabeth left on the dance floor. Percy is dead asleep, stretched out on three folding chairs pushed together and drooling slightly. The ankle monitor will come off in a couple months; it just barely peeks out from underneath the cuff of his dress pants.

Somewhere in the back of the room, Clarisse dozes with her back against the wall, her five-year-old daughter ragdolled in her lap. She hadn't had the heart to move her.

"If it'd been Clarisse's little girl," Annabeth murmurs over the soft shushing sound her wedding dress makes as it brushes the floor. "That Todd Jameson had stuck in a fridge for a month before she spontaneously discovered the ability to shadow-teleport, Clarisse wouldn't have paused to change the channel before ripping Jameson's spine out through his nose."

"I know," Nico replies instantly. "That's why she destroyed the evidence and let Percy walk from the crime he didn't commit."

They look at each other, eyes bright and breaths mingling. Annabeth thinks of the first time she saw Pauline, the three bright slit marks on her throat, and when she found out how they got there, she remembers thinking, _how the fuck are we going to explain this? How the hell is this girl going to care about Greek gods and Quests and seven-headed hydra when she's already escaped worse?_

"I've never had superpowers," she says finally, faltering. "Not like you two. I'm just a daughter of Athena. And ... and it doesn't mean I can't do something good. What's the point of us, Nico, the point of being young heroes if we can't keep changing the world even when we grow up?"

"We know." Nico runs a knuckle across the curve of her cheek. "Why do you think Percy took the fall for you? We love you."

Annabeth closes her eyes against the sharp jolt of pain in her heart at that. When she speaks, her voice is stronger, "I'd do it again. For you. For Percy. For Pauline. For every child out there who's ever been alone. I'd kill a hundred Todd Jamesons, if only they'd be safe." It's a day for oaths, and she whispers. "I swear it."

Nico exhales shakily. When the best man presses a kiss to the bride's collarbone, he is wordless and grateful and thinking that in this moment, she's never been more beautiful.

 

**december.**

The bed is a piece of crap thing with loose slats and a tendency to lean towards the bottom right corner, and it wasn't meant for three people, but Percy can't be assed to complain. Not really, with their legs pressed in between each other's like leaves in the pages of a book, with one body always in contact with another; Nico's head buried in the crook of his neck or Annabeth's chest expanding into his back with every breath she takes; hair in his mouth and fingers on his hips and their heartbeats, calling and answering and echoing in each other's.

Yeah. This threesome thing? Percy still thinks it was entirely Annabeth's fault.

It might not have been, but most brilliant ideas were usually hers, and if they weren't, she got credit for them in the end.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
